Books

by Charlie Hill

  Amy knew how relationships between men and women always ended. Their stories became incompatible. She had thought that Gary’s lack of imagination meant that they could be an exception to the rule. That whatever narratives she created to get herself by, his would keep him happily chugging alongside. But it wasn’t to be. He had been living for so long in his two-dimensional world that it had turned him into an arsehole.

  And wherever he was, he wasn’t coming back.

  In which books help Richard to overcome an existential crisis

  Three days later review copies of The Grass is Greener began to arrive at newspaper offices, bookshops and the homes of bloggers. Within twelve hours the reviewers began to die.

  A pointlessly detailed passage in Chapter 3, in which the hero of the piece argues with his wife during a Bank Holiday trip to IKEA, accounted for a part-time critic-about-town on the Bristol Evening Star; Chapter 4’s barely credible description of a drunken seduction and one-night-stand did for a contributor to Beach Reads R Us!; and the Books Editor of the Glasgow Chronicle passed away after becoming cognitively becalmed during the course of a particularly laborious pun in Chapter 5.

  The deaths were not confined to reviewers. A cleaner in cahoots with the postboy on the Manchester Telegraph succumbed to a conversation about TV theme tunes between two men supposedly sitting in a pub, and the death of the sixteen-year-old son of the owner of the popular site What’s Booking? was directly attributable to his exposure to the fourth in a series of observations about the time it takes women to leave the house…

  A copy of the novel arrived at Back Street Books with the morning’s post and it was just what Richard needed. Because that morning, he was in the clammy grip of an existential crisis.

  Its catalyst was Lauren. His relationship with the woman had gone completely wankytits, and not in a good way either. Every one of his romantic gambits had been dismissed with a sort of high-class meh. Most of these rejections Richard could ascribe to poor execution of potty wheezes. But Lauren had played her part too, by virtue of playing no discernible part at all. In the time he had known her, she had run the gamut of emotions from coolly aloof through disarmingly distant to bewilderingly together. Occasionally he’d detect a scintilla of annoyance but that was as far as it went; there had been no signs of substantial disquiet, nothing for Richard to push at, no buttons on her façade. Instead he had been throwing himself against a wall on which the only impression he had left was a series of cartoon face prints. And now he was exhausted and mind-fucked and existentially done…

  Then he opened the package, saw the book. Its cover, shining with spangly malevolence, was embossed with an illustration of a leather jacket, torn in two. It was accompanied by an invitation to ‘The People’s Literature Tour’, a press release and a photograph entitled, Hello!-style, ‘The Author at Home with Wife Amy and Son Garfield’. For a moment Richard allowed himself to be diverted by this soft-focus horror. It was a picture of domestic bliss, its duplicitous nature betrayed only by the look on the face of Sayles’ wife. Richard recognised the expression and – surprisingly – the woman too. He wondered where he had seen her before; doubtless it would have been at a pub or party, back in the day. Then he picked up the press release.

  ‘A man who has it all… the passing of time… recapture his youth,’ he read, ‘Ben and Lucy split up… blah blah… divide belongings… fuckity blah… favourite Coldplay album, Love Story DVD, pot plant…’

  Jesus please no…

  Richard didn’t need to read the book – shitballs, he wasn’t about to read the book – to see that here was the antithesis of everything a novel should be. The cover alone told him that. In the course of his work, he’d seen the like too many times before. This was a book written by rules. A desecration of the printed word. Mediocrity at its most virulently offensive. At its most obscene.

  Richard knew that books could be mediocre. And he knew that mediocrity in books was not just confined to insipid male confessionals. There was mediocrity in misery memoirs and sagas about dragons and goblins and expats having humorous experiences and dour or feisty detectives and magic-realist Anglo-Indian high-caste post-colonial allegories and novels full of nothing but vacuous po-mo trickery. And as for the undead. Don’t even get him started on the fucking undead. Yet none of this stuff had stained the pages of books with a more insidious stain than the works of the murderous bastard Sayles. None of this stuff had presented the fight against mediocrity and all it stood for as such an obvious case of life or death.

  Richard threw the book across the shop and snarled into his next piece of post. It was the local listings mag. Here was more of the same, mediocre musicals adapted from mediocre albums, mediocre films from mediocre books. Then something caught his eye. ‘Artists for Hire…’ it said. ‘Flash Mobs and Spectacles for the Non-Discerning Punter.’ And Richard had a revelation. What he could do – no, what he had to do – about every last little damnable thing in the world.

  Books. That was what this was about. That was what it all came back to. SNAPS, his non-fuck two-step with Lauren, even, at a stretch, him and Julie; all of it started with books and how they’d made him feel and behave and what they’d brought to his life and the lives of other people. The rest was incidental. And as Richard stood there in the dim lighting of the last little bookshop in town, he saw blazing before him the prospect of the ultimate provocation, of vengeance, sweet vengeance against the world, and of the return of his purpose in a fiery and glorious rush of will…

  Richard made a phone call to the Barker Follinge distributor. He asked for fifty copies of The Grass is Greener. That should be plenty. They checked his credit rating, said they’d get back to him. The deal was okayed. He arranged for the delivery to be made to the first venue of ‘The People’s Literature Tour’. Then he picked up the listings magazine and dialled the number on the advert in the smalls.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, to an enthusiastic Pippa, ‘I wonder if you can help me. I’ve just seen your advert and I think you’re just the thing I’m looking for…’

  Fifteen minutes later he finished his conversation and dialled Lauren.

  Burning books

  ‘Lauren? It’s Richard. I’ve got a plan. We’re going to burn the books.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re going to go to London and burn the books.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I’ve decided, that’s why. Well, you helped me decide as it goes. It came to me this morning. In a bookcase at your house, with all that other old-skool historical gubbins. The Savonarola.’

  ‘I’m not with you…’

  ‘You had a copy of the Life of Savonarola. On your shelf. In your back room. Haven’t you read it?’

  ‘No. It’s not mine. I mean, it belonged to someone else.’

  ‘Whatever. It gave me an idea. The idea. Savonarola was a priest who was connected to the Borgias. His thing was burning books. Well, books and other things actually. Anything he considered sinful in fact. And we’re going to do the same. It’ll be great, trust me.’

  ‘I see. But isn’t it a little extreme?’

  ‘I don’t care. The book is going to be launched in about a week’s time and we need to be down there making a noise, warning people off the thing. So. Are you with me?’

  Lauren nearly makes a move

  ‘Richard? It’s Lauren.’

  ‘I know. Didn’t we just…? You know… Get off the phone to each other?’

  ‘Yes. But there’s something I forgot to mention. I’ve been thinking—’

  ‘Oh, Christ—’

  ‘No. Not like that. It’s just this whole SNAPS business. The number of people who could be at risk. It’s enormous. And it’s been difficult. For both of us. We’ve both been working on it for weeks now – in our spare time – and I think we need to be careful not to lose ourselves to it. We owe ourselves a break, don’t you think? So, anyway. I… I mean we… I mean there’s an exhibition on at the Ikon Gallery. And I w
as wondering if you’d like to go?’

  ‘Blimey. Are you asking me out?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Because it sounds like you’re asking me out.’

  ‘Richard?’

  ‘Only if you’re asking me out—’

  ‘I’m going to hang up in a min—’

  ‘OK, OK. Yes, I’d love to.’

  A date?

  As Lauren walked out of town to the Ikon Gallery, she found herself dwelling on the implications of her invitation to Richard. She had meant what she’d said on the phone; the two of them were in need of some relief from their work on SNAPS. But there was also some truth in Richard’s suggestion too. It certainly felt as though she was asking him out. Was it possible she’d invited him as a direct consequence of the poem he’d sent her? Her reaction to it had certainly shocked her. Then again, despite being initially overwhelmed, she’d regained a sense of perspective. Even as she’d teetered, she’d taken a step back and then another, until she had regained her emotional decorum.

  Whatever the thinking behind her proposition, the gallery wasn’t providing the distraction she’d hoped for. Arriving early, she made her way to the bar, ordered a coffee and sat down at a table. The bar was busy. Two people were sitting at the counter on stools. Tapas was being served and even though it was in between what Lauren would have thought of as lunch and dinnertime, the place was doing brisk business. She watched as trays went out from the kitchen behind the bar, small terracotta dishes of olives or prawns decorated with chopped red chilli or dusted with what she presumed was paprika, plates of steaming fried whitebait to share. And she was captured and taken back to Corfu and to a taverna, a death and a book.

  It got worse. Lauren sighed, rubbed the back of her neck with her hand and opened a catalogue. All she knew of the exhibition was that it was a retrospective by a local Turner-nominated photographer. Reading the notes, she realised that even this choice was fraught with unforeseen intrusions.

  The catalogue showed a series of dour landscapes featuring brownbelt sites, recaptured and feral wasteland and the odd corrugated-iron storage shed. It was singular work. There were none of the occasional splashes of colour – on vehicles or buildings or skips – that lesser artists might have used to bring into relief the drab, washed-out greens and browns of the muddied grass and low industrial skies; there were no sudden man-made edges or angles, no contrasts to bring you up against a violent visual anomaly. This was art as a recording of the ordinary.

  And that was the problem. The representation of the ‘ordinary’ was an issue that lay at the heart of any theoretical understanding of SNAPS. And given Richard’s professed antipathy to such a literal approach to art – and her defence of it – he would surely regard the choice of exhibition as a provocative act. Talk about bashing a man over the head…

  She sipped her coffee, checked her watch against the clock behind the bar. Richard was late. She told herself it didn’t matter. Richard was always late. Rubbed her palms together, pressed her fingers to her lips as if in prayer. Then he arrived.

  He sat down at Lauren’s table. He looked twitchy. She wondered whether he had been drinking again. It didn’t seem so. His skin didn’t look healthy and his face was drawn but his eyes were bright. She thought they might be brighter than she’d ever seen them, then she realised she’d never really looked at them before, not that closely.

  ‘Hello, Richard,’ said Lauren. ‘Before we start, can I make a proposal? I’ve made some discoveries this week and I’d like to share them with you. But I meant what I said about needing a break. So can I suggest we steer clear of SNAPS, just for the next hour or so?’

  ‘By all means,’ said Richard. ‘Let’s talk about something other than books. Something safer. Like politics or religion.’

  They set off at regulation art gallery pace into the main room of the exhibition. Lauren felt uncomfortable moving so slowly. Their stately progress seemed to thicken further the air between them and exaggerate Richard’s cocking of his head, his frowns and tuts. If he was as nervous as she was, his demeanour was more convincingly relaxed.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Lauren. ‘About the photographs?’

  ‘What do I think?’ said Richard, and she was surprised at how relieved she was to see him smile. ‘I think it shows how we have to be careful not to expect too much or judge too quickly. Because if we do, important stuff gets overlooked. I think it’s about how lots of things are interesting, that we don’t have to go to the edge to find truths about life. I also think that you could have been a bit more subtle.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Lauren, pleased that he had picked up on her error of judgement.

  ‘We said no books chat, didn’t we?’ said Richard. ‘Well, that includes books chat dressed up as ‘what-do-you-think-of-the-photography?’ chat.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I see what you mean,’ said Lauren. ‘When you put it like that, though, it’s difficult, isn’t it? Avoiding books chat, I mean.’

  ‘It certainly presupposes we have other things to talk about.’

  Now it was her turn to smile. She touched him tentatively on the shoulder and left her hand there. Richard turned his whole body to her. He was very close. He looked her in the eye, with a seriousness that seemed like intent. Moved closer still.

  ‘Without scaring each other off, I mean,’ he said.

  Lauren took a step back. ‘Not at all!’ she said, maybe too enthusiastically. ‘A little bit of fear is good for you.’

  ‘Well, it gets you going, doesn’t it? Provokes a response. And you like provocative, don’t you?’

  His tone was mocking but warm. She withdrew a little further and gathered herself, even as she sensed she mustn’t let him have the better of this exchange.

  ‘I won’t say it doesn’t have its attractions… in the right sort of people, of course, in small doses,’ she said, and was pleased with the pauses and the assertiveness she brought to them. ‘But you can have too much of anything, can’t you?’

  ‘Blimey. There’s just no avoiding this book chat, is there?’

  This time they both smiled. They looked at the last of the exhibition, then continued into the bar. As Richard fetched two glasses of wine, Lauren sat at the table and thought about where her experiment would take her next.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Richard. ‘Is that it, then? Are we done?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘With the photographs?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Good. Then can I make a proposal too?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘OK. I think the time has come. Whatever happens with SNAPS, I think we should just get on with it.’

  ‘Get on with what?’

  ‘This. All this. Whatever this is.’

  ‘Whatever what is?’

  ‘This! You and me.’

  ‘I honestly wouldn’t know where to start,’ said Lauren.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘It’s been quite an experience one way or another, hasn’t it? Or series of ongoing experiences.’

  ‘It has. A mix of the extreme, if you like, and the ordinary—’

  ‘The old and the new—’

  ‘The old and the new.’

  ‘And what was it? Ah, yes. Psychological insight and a little bit of fun. Just a little bit of fun, mind you,’ said Richard. ‘We can’t be too reckless, now, can we? I suppose my point is that it’s been a bit of an eye-opener for me and I don’t want it to stop when we haven’t gotten anywhere yet. I reckon it’s time to change gear. To see what this all turns into.’

  Lauren blushed. That’s enough for now, she thought, and decided to rein herself in. She was happy with the way things had gone but if they had to ‘get on with it’, they could do so at her pace. With a ‘hmm’ that she tried to make distracted rather than non-committal, she returned to her programme. Richard, wrong-footed by this sudden reintroduction to her froideur, consoled himself by toying with the menu. Every so often he m
ade an interested noise, like a child seeking attention. Then he appeared to shrug, and stopped.

  They finished their wine in silence and headed for the exit. On the way out, they stopped at the shop in the foyer of the gallery. It was small and well stocked with coffee-table books and monographs and catalogues. As Richard browsed the photography and Lauren looked at a guide to Japanese screen prints, a thought occurred to her, one that might help her with future gallery trips or more.

  ‘Richard? You just said that investigating SNAPS has been a bit of an eye-opener. Would you say it’s changed you?’

  ‘I hope so. It’s nice to think you change with each new experience. But you never know, do you? What about you?’

  ‘Certainly. Certainly. I don’t know exactly how, but…’

  At this, Richard had his attention taken by something over Lauren’s shoulder.

  ‘Hold that thought,’ he said, and slid past her, crossing quickly to a man on the other side of the shop. The man had his back to them. He was dressed in old denim and was holding an enormous carrier bag from a DIY chain. Lauren watched as Richard spoke to him. They were talking quietly and she couldn’t hear what was being said. The man shrugged and Richard shook his head. The man looked over his shoulder and around the shop and rummaged in his bag. Then he put something back on the shelf – Lauren couldn’t see what – said something else to Richard and hurried out of the shop.

  Richard rejoined Lauren.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. That fella was just about to steal a book. A big, expensive book. I was going to turn a blind eye, but it’s a bit more complicated than that, isn’t it? Because this is an independent art gallery and it can’t afford losses like that.’